Why the Services page is the hardest page on your website

If you had to guess which page on the website is the hardest for professional services firms to create content for, what would it be?

If you said the Services page, you would be right. And, yes, it is ironic.

Until you think about it.

The About page is easy because our culture is vibrant and we want to brag on how good our coworkers are at their jobs. Case Studies are easy because we can talk about our clients and the good work of our team at the same time.

But when we write about our services, it just sounds so much more generic than it feels. So much like our competitors. So much more like a commodity.

The Services page is hard because we start with what we do. With our skills, processes, deliverables. And when we do that, it will always sound generic. The best Services pages read like a diagnosis of problems your client has. And when they read it, they shake their heads. It starts with a problem, goes to observed patterns, and how you solve the problem.

But there is often a compounding issue. You might be thinking outside-in on your services, but if your positioning is too broad, they will still feel off.

If you serve too broad a client base, the problems aren't similar enough to recognize a pattern. You can't articulate what your buyer feels because you don't have one type of buyer; you have twelve. Or, with too many services, you don't get enough repetitions in any one area to develop a point of view that sounds like yours instead of everyone else's.

So your services stay broad to appeal to a broad client base. And broad appeals are generic.

Unfortunately, the Services page isn't a writing problem. Those problems are easy enough to solve. It's a positioning problem.

If that sounds familiar, the Brand Warm-Up is built to surface exactly this kind of positioning problem and the issues it ripples into.

We've written about this same trap showing up on two other pages: your process page and your website as a whole. Same root cause, three different symptoms.

‍